Accepting Applications for Fall 2019

We are accepting K, 6th, and 9th grade enrollment applications for Fall 2019 entry. We accept 1st-5th grade applications for limited backfill slots. For more information, please see the Enrollment page for details. You may also call 413-582-7040 or email us at info@pvcics.org.

Webmaster

Equal Opportunity Provider

In accordance with Federal law and United States Department of Agriculture policy,
this institution is prohibited from discriminating on the basis of
race, color, national origin, sex, gender identity, age, or disability. (Not all
prohibited bases apply to all programs.) To file a complaint of
discrimination, write to USDA, Director of Civil Rights, 1400 Independence Avenue, S.W., Washington, D.C. 20250-9410, or call (800) 795-3272 (voice). USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer and lender.

NORTHAMPTON — When 12-year-old Hunter Palm visited China for two
weeks in April with his mother and grandmother, the locals, hearing him speak
Chinese, asked: “How long have you been living in China?”

“Hunter was our interpreter, thank goodness,” his grandmother,
Jody O’Brien, said at her grandson’s home on Maple Ridge Road in Florence. “If
we hadn’t had Hunter, we wouldn’t have been able to ride the bus or order
food.”

For O’Brien, 79, a nurse from East Longmeadow, the trip was her
sixth assignment with Global Volunteers, a service organization that sends
volunteers abroad. On previous trips, she has volunteered as a nurse in a public
health clinic in Mexico and worked with children with disabilities in an
orphanage in Romania. She has also worked in schools in St. Lucia, the Cook
Islands, and the Chinese city Kunming.

This time, her daughter Kelly Palm and grandson, a sixth-grader at
the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School in Hadley, came with her.
The three generations taught English to students at the Xi’an Biomedical
Technical College, in Xi’an — a city of over 8 million in central China’s
Shaanxi province.

“Because of Hunter’s Chinese-speaking ability, I thought it would
be wonderful for him to have an opportunity to use it outside the classroom, in
a country where that’s their native language,” O’Brien said.

Hunter and his mother co-taught a class, and O’Brien taught a
class on her own. Other than basic phrases such as “Hello” and “How are you?”
provided by the volunteer organization, Palm and O’Brien had no previous
knowledge of the language. The trip offered Palm a window into what her son has
learned at the Hadley school.

“I know part of me was like, ‘Wow, it really works,’” she said.

A school choice

Kelly Palm, 45, a nurse practitioner, said that when she was
exploring kindergarten options for Hunter and his younger brother Tyler — now 9
and a third-grader at the charter school — she and her husband, Jeff, thought
the immersion experience would provide a valuable opportunity for their
children to be bilingual. Jeff Palm is founder and executive director of the
Northampton study abroad organization Center for International Studies, and
Hunter has accompanied his father on business trips overseas.

Since kindergarten, Hunter and Tyler have been in Chinese-speaking
classrooms, learning the language by listening and interacting with native
speakers every day. From his first day of school, Hunter remembers his teachers
speaking exclusively in Chinese, but starting off talking slowly and using
simple phrases.

It took around two months, he said, for him to catch on.

“The fact that we were able to understand them that quickly was
pretty cool,” he said.

Hunter said he can now read and write essays in Mandarin, in
addition to speaking the language.

Kathleen Wang, the charter school’s principal, said that while she
has students who have traveled to China, Hunter is the first she knows of who
has taught English there.

“It’s great,” Wang said. “Our school’s mission is for students to
be bilingual and understand not only Chinese language, but Chinese culture, and
we want them to get involved in community service and have the ability to go
between cultures.”

The charter school opened in 2007. In fall 2014, the school added
a 10th-grade class as it expands to become what will be the first
kindergarten-through-12th-grade Chinese immersion school in the country,
according to the school’s executive director, Richard Alcorn.

Wang said that with the addition of the high school grades,
community service is becoming a part of the curriculum, so she expects to see
more students doing volunteer work.

Language comes to life

When Hunter interacted with Chinese citizens this spring, Palm
said, they not only understood each other, but the locals complimented him on
his Chinese accent.

His grandmother added, “Hunter was kind of an oddity in China
because of the color of his hair and the fact that when he opened his mouth and
Mandarin came out, they were dumbfounded to think that this little guy was
speaking their language.”

Hunter was able to speak the language well enough to enjoy some
jokes with his students. For example, he recalled, when some of them tried to
cheat by looking up answers in the back of a textbook, he told them
lightheartedly that they should at least try to hide the book behind them — and
they laughed.

And during breaks from class, the students would crowd around
Hunter to take “selfies” with him, his mother recalled with a smile.

“Every person that we met, once they spoke to Hunter for more than
about 30 seconds, I would see the phones and the cameras come out,” Palm said.

Even outside the classroom, children would approach them on the
streets wanting to practice their English. Many people asked them what they
thought of China. But Palm said it was hard to determine just from experiencing
one city.

“For me probably, the biggest thing I thought of China was it was
a land of contrast,” she said. For example, she said she would see
state-of-the-art buildings, but then see city workers using branches to sweep
the streets.

With this experience under his belt, Hunter is interested in
further broadening his horizons.

“I’d like to learn a third language and become trilingual,” he
said. Arabic and Spanish, he said, are the “top two on my list.”